In the future, I think this will be the big research issue concering the stimulus. It almost surely saved public sector jobs. The question is whether there was any trickle-down into the private sector. The authors suggest that there was more negative trickle-down than I would have expected.

If you follow the left-wing economist blogs, you will see that there could not have been any crowding out of the private sector, because interest rates are not high. That is what happens when you think of the economy as a set of equations drawn from textbooks, rather than thinking in terms of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.

"If you follow the left-wing economist blogs, you will see that there could not have been any crowding out of the private sector, because interest rates are not high. That is what happens when you think of the economy as a set of equations drawn from textbooks, rather than thinking in terms of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade."

There are other ways to cut medicaid - reducing the number of people it covers, for instance. In fact, I think it should be completely overhauled as it's pretty crappy coverage for the poor and hurts rather than helps them in many cases, but that's a long story.

Charitable care doesn't necessarily increase because Medicaid is cut. Besides, does charitable care raise or shifts costs? I didn't think doctors who went abroad to perform surgery charged their patients more to pay for these charitable endeavors.

I'll concede that cutting medicaid could "cut health care" (although, I'm not certain what you mean by that), but not necessarily so. It all depends on those devilish details.

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